The Petrochemical Corridor

For twenty five miles east of Houston's Turning Basin, past Pasadena and Deer Park, across from Channelview and on to Baytown and Galveston Bay, runs the largest petrochemical complex in the United States and the second largest in the world. The plants came for the geometry: deep water on one side, cheap flat land on the other, the Gulf Coast oil fields behind, and a dredged channel that let crude arrive and products leave by tanker. Baytown's refinery took its first oil in 1920 and now anchors a site of several thousand acres. Deer Park's, run for decades by Shell and sold to its partner Pemex in 2022, distils over a quarter of a million barrels a day, while Shell stayed put next door with the chemical plant. Together the channel refineries run on the order of a million barrels of crude a day, alongside the chemical works that turn much of the rest into plastics. At night the corridor is one of the memorable sights of industrial America, miles of lit towers, flares and tank farms. The towns beside it were not built by the industry that now defines them: Pasadena and Deer Park began as farm colonies, Pasadena growing strawberries, and were swallowed later. Baytown is the exception and the real thing, laid out by Humble Oil in the 1920s, streets and utilities and mortgages provided, and so thoroughly a company creation that for decades it never bothered to incorporate.